Managing cybersecurity in industrial environments starts long before controls, firewalls, or compliance frameworks. It starts with understanding the business itself: what machines are installed, what purpose they serve, how systems interact, and who is responsible for keeping them running.
Yet most off‑the‑shelf tools – from Governance/Risk/Compliance (GRC) platforms to Config Managament DBs (CMDB) and IP Address Management (IPAM) solutions – are not built to capture this reality – yet they interact to form a platform for OT Cybersecurity. They focus on technicalities of assets, controls, and data points, but fall short when it comes to modeling the operational and business logic and the real world realities that actually drives risk.
In this talk, Andy will show how they took a Digital Design approach: instead of starting with technical device information, they built a model that reflects the digital twin of the plant – systems, capabilities, services, communication flows, and responsibilities. On top of this model, cybersecurity, network management, and audit traceability emerge naturally.
What makes this journey different is how it was built. Leveraging AI and Copilot, they were able to:
– rapidly design and evolve a domain model that reflects real-world operations
– translate overlapping regulatory frameworks (like NIS2, NIST CSF, or KAS‑51) into structured, common, usable data models
– and develop a working GRC and IPAM solution in an agile, product-driven way – without the typical overhead of enterprise platforms
The result is a system where compliance is no longer a separate activity, but a by-product of understanding the business, following the better way of how Digital Design makes business realities more integral to solutions.
This talk is not about replacing existing tools – it’s about exposing the missing layer between them: the model of reality itself by applying Digital Design practices.
Industrial Cybersecurity and Digital Design at Linde Gas.
Andy Beck has been a Software Developer, Requirements Engineer, Project Manager and Digital Designer for more than 40 years – a typical child of the 80s C64 era! He had always a great interest in „bridging the gap“ between Business and IT and was fascinated what leverage tiny software design decisions can have to software quality aspects like understandability, maintainability, flexibility, performance, usability etc. – hence he is a natural supporter of the Digital Design Manifesto, both by intuition and practical experience. In his current role responsible for industrial cyber security for Linde’s German filling plants, he brings the business view to the technical cyber security to balance and justify security controls and their practicality in operations.
